Jelly Bean Math

In honor of Easter, I decided we would do a fun math activity with one of everyone's favorite Easter candies...Jelly Beans!!!

It was very fun and actually right on time as we had just done our topic opener the day before about sorting and classifying. 

I gave each child a random assortment of jelly beans and a work mat. First, they had to sort their jelly beans. I asked them what would be a good way to sort them and we decided that color was the best attribute to sort by since they were all the same shape. 

Here are some of our sorted beans. 

  After we sorted, we learned about a new way to organize and count...tally marks! The children had to make tally marks to organize their data and show how many of each color jelly bean they had in their bag.

 Then the children used the data they collected to make a graph showing how many they had of each color. We learned that having tally marks to show the amount makes it a little bit easier than having to count and re-count to find out how many you have.

 Here are a few of our finished graphs!

When we were all finished, we answered questions about the data we collected. Which color jelly beans did you have the most of? Which color jelly beans did you have the least of? How many more yellow jelly beans did you have than green? This was a great way for students to compare and understand the data that they had in front of them.

This activity was a fun way to finish out our last day of school before spring break. The kids were really impressed that they could actually do math with jelly beans. What a yummy math lesson!